The MathUI workshop has been broadcast on the web. See the Online MathUI web-page.
Math Search
- 9:00-9:30: Andrea Kohlhase:
Design of Search Interfaces for Mathematicians
The availability of mathematical knowledge on the Web changes mathematical practices. In a study of professional mathematicians' search behavior we identified ten behavioral patterns particular to mathematicians. In this paper, we present a set of design goals for mathematical search interfaces implied by these patterns and insights derived from them. - 9:30-9:45 Helena Mihaljevic-Brandt, Fabian Müller and Nicolas Roy:
Author profile pages in zbMATH – improving accuracy through user
A solid and distinctive online record of a scientist's research achievements is nowadays a must, in particular for a researcher at an early career stage looking for a better university position, applying for a grant or a promotion, or trying to establish new contacts and build partnerships and projects. In the global world of science there are already numerous services offering research profile sites, such as Google Scholar, Scopus or ORCID. In the field of mathematics, however, the community still relies a lot on the traditional services MathSciNet and zbMATH, which stand for a high level of quality control regarding data inclusion and assignment. However, the enormously growing number of mathematical publications and new mathe- maticians begs the question of how to design author profile pages for mathematicians which fit the new trends of communication in the era of social networks, while keeping (or better increasing) the existing level of reliability. In our contribution we plan to present some ideas from the development team of zbMATH addressing this topic.
Coffee break
Exploration
- 10:30-11:00 Ou Yamamoto and Masatoshi Kokubu:
Visualization of Tangent Developables on a Volumetric Display
A tangent developable is a developable surface constructed by the union of the tangent lines of a space curve. These surfaces have applications not only in mathematics but also in engineering, such as for designing cars, ships, and apparel. However, since tangent developables typically have complicated and twisted surfaces, it is difficult to understand their structures from their images on a 2D screen. For ease in understanding such complicated structures, a more improved visualization method is required. In this study, we propose and evaluate a software tool for visualizing tangent developables on a volumetric display that draws 3D images directly in real 3D space. - 11:00-11:30 Carmela Acevedo and Michael Kohlhase:
OpenMathMap: Interaction
Mathematics is a fast growing discipline where an average of 120 thousand papers are published per year. We seek to provide better interfaces to interact with this huge collection of documents. To study new techniques that allow users to intuitively assess and interact with mathematical publication collections we use OpenMathMap (OMM) - a computer-generated map which represents Mathematical Subject Classifications (MSC) class as "countries", "states", and "cities". We present a platform that allows to build interactions with semantical meta-data based on OMM and show a variety of information services taking advantage of the semantic and hierarchical properties of the dataset at hand. We evaluate the platform to determine how successful the map is as an intuitive complement for search. The map proved to be a useful interface for interacting with and understanding the results that were being displayed.
Invited talk: Jaime Carvalho e Silva
11:30-12:30: What international studies say about the importance and limitations of using computers to teach mathematics in secondary schools Room (amphitheatre)
Mobile Math
- 14:30-15:00 Frédéric Wang and Raniere Silva:
Firefox OS Web Apps for Science
In this document, we describe recent work made by the Mozilla MathML team to help publishing scientific content using Web technologies. We focus on the Firefox OS platform currently being developed by Mozilla that provides a good framework to create mathematical user interfaces on mobile devices.(see also the pdf) - 15:00-15:30 Paul Libbrecht and Kerstin Schneider: (online)
Formula Collection Mobile Apps Realized by Teachers
Formula collections are books used in several European countries to support the practice of mathematics of by its learners and later by its practitioners. They are compendia of mathematical formulæ that students employ during their studies, and which may be of use in later professional life. This research explores the opportunity of bringing the formula collection to the mobile phones of the school students. It is motivated by the fact that the formula collection may be one of the rare objects that pupils may refer to later in their lives, when mathematical knowledge needs to be recalled. Making it a mobile phone app makes it a zero weight object which is in easy reach. Technically, this app is realized by a set of HTML files compiled into a mobile application. This makes the formula collection a first class citizen that students can easily access. More importantly, this makes it an artifact that teachers can create themselves instead of relying on a publisher: using their notations and their selected content. The centerpoint of this research is to enable teachers in creating and delivering such an app to the mobile devices of their students. - 15:30-16:00 Marco Pollanen, Jeff Hooper, Bruce Cater and Sohee Kang:(online)
Towards a Universal Interface for Real-Time Mathematical Communication
Rapid growth in mobile computing has given rise to a dramatic evolution in communication tools that have the potential to transform the educational experience. Because of the complexities of mathematical communication, however, progress towards the realization of that potential has been particularly slow in the mathematical sciences. We are addressing this by developing iCE (interface for Collaborative Equations), a multimodal mathematical communication environment for post-secondary mathematics and statistics courses. Based on our experiences with this, we discuss the user requirements and difficulties in building a universal interface – one that allows users, ranging from mathematical novices to experts, to intuitively communicate mathematics in real-time using a broad range of computing devices.
Formulæ in Spreadsheets
- 16:30-17:00 Andrea Kohlhase and Alexandru Toader:
FEncy: Spreadsheet Formulae Exploration
Spreadsheets are well-known to be frequently-used but error-prone communication devices. They are useful since they are active (e.g., automatic computation), provide a cognitive notation system drawing on visualizing values, meanings and relations at the same time (enabled by labeled, color-coded grids), and provide easy-to-use domain-specific operations (e.g., computational functions). The latter, in particular, is enabled by the text-style formula format in spreadsheets, in which variables are replaced by cell references. For simply-structured formulae this works very well. To keep the formulae simple, computations are modularized into subformulae and as such distributed over and beyond the spreadsheet. This makes the provenance (tree) of spreadsheet values difficult to understand – a probable cause for the high error rate in spreadsheets. To explore and navigate the subformulae involved in the computation of a cell value we present the subformula explorer "FEncy", a tree-based, explorative interface: Whenever a user clicks on a cell its formula becomes the root of a cell-dependency graph. Each child node displays the formula of a cell (or range) reference used in the parent formula either in the original text-style or potentially in math notation. Moreover, each node represents a direct link to the respective cell (or range), so that it can be used for formula navigation as well. - 17:00-17:30 Roxanne Leitão and Chris Roast:
Developing visualisations for spreadsheet formulae: towards increasing the accessibility of science, technology, engineering and maths subjects
Spreadsheets are widely used within Science, technology, engineering and maths education. Despite their widespread use, end-user spreadsheet errors are still extremely common and have been shown to have an adverse effect on learning. The textual representation of formulas can be particularly complex and error-prone, exacerbating barriers to dyslexic users. Our work focuses on the design and development of a visual language to graphically represent spreadsheet formulae, with the objective of making them easier to understand than their default textual form. This work contributes to a body of human factors research focused upon spreadsheets.
Coffee break
demo session
From 18:00 to, about, 19:00, we shall have the demo session. Programme still to be announced.
